The Nursery
by Jessica01
Summary: See inside. I couldn't come up with a good title. Contains OC.


The Nursery

From Cordria's profile, quoted from the actual summary-

"Feel free to steal the ideas and turn them into actual stories."

**The Nursery  
**A Danny Phantom FanFiction by Cordria

I just change it slightly.

Doreen Johnson was a lady in the early nineteen eighties who was murdered by her husband for insurance money. Tucker and Danny had always wondered about the screams they had heard coming from the old house. They finally decided to investigate.

Tucker sat in the corner of the room, feet splayed out before him, his head bent attentively over a small, thin box held in his hands. The only source of illumination in the room was the tiny LCD screen imbedded in the box. A grin flittered across his face as tiny, rather soft beeping noises filled the room.

Occasionally, he would glance up from his toy to scan the room. After each scan, he would shake his head and then continue with his game. The soft beepings and whirings of the game became an odd sort of lullaby not quite suited to the ancient nursery he was currently occupying. Even though this third-floor room was created for children, dust covered every surface. Cobwebs snaked from the ceiling. Spiders and small critters inhabited the darkened recesses of long-forgotten toys. The boy, playing with his game, was quite alone.

Until, rather suddenly, he was not.

A woman was walking through the room, a sad, distant smile on her face. Her gaze passed over the filth, the insects, and the brokenness of the room, her eyes never lingering on the dangling spider webs. She ghosted over to one of the shattered cribs, her pale fingers delicately stretching out to touch an unseen child.

Although the woman made no sound – her thin body never creaking the rotting floorboards, her slippered feet never stirring the thick layers of dust, her shallow breathing not even a whisper in the stillness of the night –Tucker looked up. Perhaps it was the chill wind that had invaded the room, or perhaps it was the eerie silence that had seemed to stifle the happy sounds of his game. Whatever the reason, the boy smiled vaguely at the sight of the lady in the long, white robe.

He watched as the lady stood up from the remains of the crib and drifted over to the bed along the other wall. The bed's coverings and mattress were long gone; the skeleton of the bed frame the only thing left to loom eerily in the night-shrouded room. She paused in front of the bed, gazing sorrowfully down at the time-worm object. In her eyes, the bed was not a collection of metal braces that had been lost to time. It was a child's bed, covered in a soft, hand-made quilt, a down pillow plopped at one end, the metal burnished to shine even at night. She smiled down at a child only she could see, reaching out to pull the quilt up around the child's shoulders.

He set down his game, the LCD screen lighting up the area around him. He picked up a long, narrow tube with antenna coming out of the end and pointed it in her direction. His face took on an odd, green cast as the tube's screen momentarily lit up, displaying the results of the scan. Carefully, he set the tube back down and turned to watch the lady in white continue her routine.

A morose smile crossed his face as the woman moved from her eldest child's bed to the delicate crib that had once held her youngest. She leaned over the dust enveloped object, her ancient eyes taking in the sleeping form of the tiny infant. Silently, her mouth moved, an archaic lullaby being sung unheard to a baby that no longer existed.

Slowly she reached into the cradle, picking up her bundle of life. To the boy in the corner, it looked as though the lady hadn't picked up anything, but he said nothing as she rocked the armful of air back and forth, her mouth moving steadily in her noiseless melody. She drifted over towards the closed glass doors that lead out to a tiny porch, not noticing the cracks and the grime as she neared.

The boy stood up to follow as she walked straight through the fractured glass, carrying her remembered infant with her to stand by the splintered railing. He carefully pushed open the door, gazing through the opening as the woman waited in the night. She stood there for a moment, rocking back and forth on her heels, staring out at a hundred-year-old sky. Stars speckled her vision, a full moon lighting the memory of a forest of trees and a calm lake. The boy, however, could only see the thick clouds and the harsh lines of the modern city.

He waited, silent, as she closed her eyes and leaned over the shattered remains of the railing. The phantom of a smile drifted across her face as a nonexistent wind pushed at her translucent hair. Cradling her beloved child in one arm, she used the other arm to lever herself farther up onto the thin, wood slats.

"You're dead. Your children are dead. You have no reason to stay on this plane any longer." He said. The lady paid no attention.

As if a switch had been thrown, the sound began to drift in on the wind. The boy blinked as he listened to her forgotten lullaby, mixed with a distant laughter. She smiled down at her baby, swiveling around so that she was sitting on the railing facing the nursery doors.

Her laughter died away as an odd look came to her eyes. "Robbie?" her voice whispered, slightly out of sync with the movements of her mouth. "What are you…?"

Frozen wind gushed through the ancient lullaby as the woman gasped, her eyes wide. Suddenly, as if she had been pushed by an unseen hand, the lady toppled off the third-floor balcony and tumbled out of sight. "No!" her spectral shriek split the air as she plummeted to the ground.

The boy eased out onto the crumbling balcony to look down below. As he had expected, the body of the woman was no where to be seen. He slipped back into the dusty nursery and quickly strode across the room. Shivering as the echoes of her scream pushed at his heart, the boy collected his small collection of belongings and hurried down the stairs.

He pulled out a cell phone as soon as he was out of the crumbling building and quickly dialed a memorized number. "Danny?" he asked, his voice still shaking. "She's just an imprint ghost. There's nothing we can do." Quiet descended on the street as the boy walked down the dark street, listening to his friend.

"Yeah, I know. When they tear down that building to build some new high-rise she won't even notice. She'll haunt the third floor thinking it's still her nursery. I tried telling her, but she didn't her me." He turned around to glance up at the balcony where he had just witnessed the woman's murder. "Poor Doreen Johnson." he whispered.

Suddenly he blinked and grinned at his phone. "No, that's not what I said. No, it's not." He laughed softly, the last of her deathly chill leaving his soul. "How's the studying going?" Danny had a make-up exam in English the next day.

_"Imprint" Ghosts - ectoplasmic manifestations that are created due to a strong, emotional occurrence (usually death) or an action that has been repeated often enough to create an "imprint" in the area. These imprints cannot interact with people or the true environment - they merely play out the same few seconds of time every time they appear. They never deviate. Imprint ghosts encompass most of the "real life" ghost hauntings. They are also sometimes called "remnants."_


End file.
